Dominant offensive line play is hard to find in the NFL, and that’s a problem for a league that is gearing more and more towards a pass-first approach with each passing year.

The problem with that lack of top-tier play is that when even a slightly above-average offensive tackle hits the open market — given how valuable even the slightest upgrade can be at the position — teams will fall over each other in the attempt to sign that player to a big-money deal. As an example, look no further than the Oakland Raiders‘ signing of Trent Brown. Brown — a player whose three-year grade ranks 51st among the 113 offensive tackles with at least 500 snaps since 2016 — is coming off a reasonably middle-of-the-road 2018 campaign, but he still inked a deal that will make him the highest-paid offensive lineman in NFL history.

While the beneficiaries of that kind of supply-and-demand market are quite rightly the free agents themselves, there is, behind the scenes, an even greater beneficiary — the dominant offensive lineman who can sit and wait for the market price to be driven up by above-average players and then take advantage of that market price when the right time comes.

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Dominant offensive line play is hard to find in the NFL, and that’s a problem for a league that is gearing more and more towards a pass-first approach with each passing year.

The problem with that lack of top-tier play is that when even a slightly above-average offensive tackle hits the open market — given how valuable even the slightest upgrade can be at the position — teams will fall over each other in the attempt to sign that player to a big-money deal. As an example, look no further than the Oakland Raiders‘ signing of Trent Brown. Brown — a player whose three-year grade ranks 51st among the 113 offensive tackles with at least 500 snaps since 2016 — is coming off a reasonably middle-of-the-road 2018 campaign, but he still inked a deal that will make him the highest-paid offensive lineman in NFL history.

While the beneficiaries of that kind of supply-and-demand market are quite rightly the free agents themselves, there is, behind the scenes, an even greater beneficiary — the dominant offensive lineman who can sit and wait for the market price to be driven up by above-average players and then take advantage of that market price when the right time comes.